Summary: Researching Criminology

Read the summary and the most important questions on researching criminology

• 1 carrying out your own research study

• What are the 5 steps of doing your own research?

  1. Identify a research topic
  2. Review secondary sources to get an overview i.e. do a literature review
  3. Identify gap in the literature and form a suitable research aim and questions 
  4. Consider the methodology; if its primary research, what will participants have to do and when?
  5. Consider the ethical issues

• 1.4.2 formulate your hypothesis

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• What is the difference between the two hypothesis?

  • If you find a clear direction in the literature then you can formulate a one tailed hypothesis (e.g. black males are more likely to be stopped and searched compared to white males)
    

  
  

  • If you do not find a clear direction in the literature then you can formulate a two tailed hypothesis (e.g. there will be a difference between black males and white males in how often they are stopped and searched) 
    

• 1.4.4 advantages and disadvantages of labatory studides

• What are the advantages of labaratory studies?

  • Easy to replicate 
    
  • Lab studies use standardised procedure and measures that allow it to be easily repeated 
    

  
  

  • Researcher has control over variables
    
  • The experiment can isolate the IV in order to observe its effect on another variable (DV) 
    

• What are the disadvantages of laboratory studies?

  • Ecological validity
    
  • Do the design conditions of the experiment represent those encountered in the ‘real’ world? Can the results of the study be applied to different environments?
    

  
  

  • Mundane Realism
    
  • Can the results of a study be applied to everyday life?
    
  • Behaviour is often explored in rigid designs / data reduced to numerical values
    

• 2 writing a literature review

• 2.4 narrative literature review: critically engage with the literature

• What are 5 narrative literature review points?

  • Aims to analyse and summarise a body of literature. 
    

  
  

  • Will present a comprehensive background of the literature within the topic area of interest 
    

  
  

  • Will highlight new research, identify gaps or recognise inconsistencies. 
    

  
  

  • This type of literature review can help develop theoretical and conceptual frameworks 
    

  
  

  • is often critical in scope – pulls at the threads of the existing body of knowledge – questions the rationale of the current research being conducted.  
    

• 2.5 systematic literature review: providing an overview

• What are 5 points about the systematic literature review?

  • Undertakes a more rigorous approach to reviewing the literature
    

  
  

  •  selects and critically appraises research – seeks to organise bodies of study (as a result, is often used in emerging fields of research). 
    

  
  

  • Uses a systematic approach – has strict selection criteria for literature it covers (i.e. specific time/date range etc.) 
    

  
  

  •  The review identifies and critiques the type of information searched and reported – aims to organise it. 
    

  
  

  • The search terms, search strategies (including database names, platforms, dates of search) and limits all need to be included in the review
    

• 3 quantitative methods

• 3.1.1 quantitative research

• For what three things can you use quantitative research?

  • In descriptive research, you simply seek an overall summary of your study variables.
    
  • In correlational research, you investigate relationships between your study variables.
    
  • In experimental research, you systematically examine whether there is a cause-and-effect relationship between variables.

• 3.1.2 quantitative data analysis

• What two different kinds of statistics do you have?

  • Descriptive statistics will give you a summary of your data and include measures of averages and variability. You can also use graphs, scatter plots and frequency tables to visualise your data and check for any trends or outliers.
    

  
  

  • Inferential statistics allows you to make predictions or generalisations based on your data. You can test your hypothesis or use your sample data to estimate the population parameters.

• 3.3 carrying out our own project

• What are the 7 steps of doing your own quantitative research?

  1. Read the literature
     
  2. design a research aim and research questions
  3. hypotheses
  4. prepare survey 
  5. ethics
  6. collect participants 
  7. create an SPSS file

• 3.3.6 step 6: collect participants

• What two ways to collect participants?

  • Random – A sample chosen randomly is meant to be an unbiased representation of the total population.
    
  • Stratified – method of sampling from a population which can be partitioned into subpopulations.